Thank you for your thorough response!
I figured there wouldn’t be an upper limit but I’ve been burned before in the past with trying to use too big of a drive in various applications over the past 3 decades of computer use so I wanted to be sure before dropping a lot of money on new high capacity drives for the NAS.
When I replaced the one drive a few months ago I just removed the faulty drive from the NAS and slotted in the new drive in its place and the NAS copied everything and was up in running again in a few days. It was only 4TB but it took awhile. I know it should be able to if I replace like for like sized drives but I wasn’t sure how it would be have if I start replacing 4TB drives with 20tb drives.
I do have a drive cloner already, buried in an old tech box in the garage that I could use but it is several years old (6 maybe?) so I am sure it isn’t as fast a a newer one. Maybe I will pick up one or two of the ones you suggested to speed the process along.
Excellent write up. I hear people ask about this all the time, why the USA defaulted towards SMS/MMS/iMessage when other parts of the world didn’t. It is not the case of now but the history of the technological development and saturation of the technology within the younger demographics that got us here naturally. We didn’t have to make a choice of which platform to migrate our friend/family groups too because we had enough of the functions we needed built into all of our phones along the last 30 years.
It doesn’t come down to what is the best platform right now, it comes down to what was the best, and easiest, platform to get all my friends and family using when my country/region/friend group/etc got smartphones. There are large swaths of the world population where their technology exposure was landline>TV>Internet cafe>smartphone. Where the beginning of their online presence was through an Internet cafe and then very soon after (within years) they had a smart phone. In that model their first interaction with instant messaging was not phone to phone but computer to computer and they used messenger/instagram/whatsapp/wechat and etc and those social networks of friends migrated with them from the Internet cafe PC as the main point of access to a Smartphone as the main point of access.
I am with you here. I have a 2003 BMW Z4, not as expensive as people expect it to be, fun to drive and have had very few problems with it. 114k miles on it.
Though I have not had to do any major fixes on it I do sleep better at night knowing that I have several friends who are car guys that have all the equipment and tools to pretty much fix anything on it, within reason.
Also, lots of enthusiasts for those cars out there, plenty of forums with 20+ years worth of documentation from people fixing their own roadster and helping others fix theirs. Small car, physical buttons and controls, well engineered, fast, fun and reliable.
Ah ha! Thank you, this was one of my worries with increasing the capacity, I was worried that even after replacing the 4TB drives with larger capacity drives that the new drives would still only be limited to the lower capacity partitions. I wasn’t sure if there was a way to increase them.
My work around for this was to back up all the data on the NAS currently (only ~7.2TB) onto an external drive. Put the new larger capacity drives into the NAS, format them properly and setup the RAID as needed and then transfer the data back onto the new fresh larger capacity drives in the NAS from the external drive.